1/26/2007

After a slew of L.A. Times articles casting doubt on the evidence, it turns out that the youths charged in that black-on-white hate crime in Long Beach have been found guilty.

Read the linked article, which (to me) drips with sympathy for the defense. Sample quote:

[Kiana] Alford, 18, was able to reconstruct the incident in extraordinary detail, describing who in the scrum punched and kicked which woman — including who threw lemons and pumpkins.

“That’s the one throwing lemons,” she told police of a 14-year-old girl she had never met. “She hit at least two people with them.”

Praise for Alford’s abilities’ as a witness — or pro-defense sarcasm?

Read it all — and you be the judge!

Oh, by the way: in a group beating, you don’t have to show which person administered which blows, if you can show all the defendants participated in the beating. Read the article in vain for that legal tidbit.

P.S. Another unbiased quote: “Bouas accused the defendants — and one 13-year-old boy in the audience — of being gang members.”

Because there are no 13-year-old gang members.

For what it’s worth — and it’s worth a lot to me — Mrs. P. personally knows the prosecutor and likes her.

Ok, actress Jessica Lange didn’t quite say that exactly. But she sure came close in my eyes.

Like many, I now consider myself one who agrees that Bush has handled Iraq poorly (among many other issues). However, this exchange between Lange and writer Michael Coveney had me cracking up by exposing the loony litmus tests that the Left often puts on people:

1. I was always under the impression that the footage that was cut from the director’s original version of “Path To 9/11″ could be found onYouTube and elsewhere on the Internet, so I’m not sure that airing this footage now on Fox is really all that big of a deal.

2. I am (pleasantly) surprised that ABC hasn’t screamed “CopyrightViolation!” as a way of avoiding embarrassment and further protecting the Clinton administration. But I suppose that they still have time to do that. After all, when other people bring video cameras into theaters to record footage, they are actually brought up on criminal charges of copyright violations. (Fair use in this instance? I was under the impression that the MPAA had already successfully killed off that concept…)

I am confident about one thing though, the really important part of the Fox broadcast won’t be the film footage that they show – it will be the subsequent interview with writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and former CIA agent Michael Scheuer. They will no doubt be very effective in defending their respective work in light of recentrevelations. That part will be informative and potentially important.

In this case, a “fake but accurate” film on how 9/11 came about remains entirely justified in my view.

Andrew Klavan is back in the L.A. Times. He decries the lack of films depicting the war on terror in a positive light:

In all fairness, moviemakers have a legitimately baffling problem with the nature of the war itself. In order to honestly dramatize the simple truth about this existential struggle, you have to depict right-minded Americans — some of whom may be white and male and Christian — hunting down and killing dark-skinned villains of a false and wicked creed. That’s what’s happening, on a good day anyway, so that’s what you’d have to show.

Moviemakers are reluctant to do that because, even though it’s the truth, on screen it might appear bigoted and jingoistic. You can call that political correctness or multiculturalism gone mad — and sure, there’s a lot of that going around. But despite what you might have heard, there are sensible, patriotic people in the movie business too. And even they, I suspect, falter before the prospect of presenting such a scenario.

You’d think that moviemakers would see the success of a show like “24” and be eager to produce a movie along those lines. Klavan says it isn’t happening and explains why.

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